Links: PC-BSD 8.1 and Lightspark 0.4.2 Released, Other Free Software/Open Source News
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2010-07-22 18:55:05 UTC
- Modified: 2010-07-22 19:00:10 UTC
Summary: Today's news about digital freedom and openness
Morevna is an open source anime project made using open source tools like Synfig, Blender, GIMP and Krita. Unlike Project London Movie, Morevna is not only created using free and open source tools, but Morevna anime will also be released and distributed as free content. This project definitely deserves a lot of appreciation.
Whether you just want to balance your checkbook or you need to track the finances of a large global corporation, you can find open source software to do the job. For our list of open source financial tools, we cast a wide net and included applications related to enterprise resource management, point-of-sale and even employee time tracking. Not to mention traditional accounting and financial management tools.
One trend worth noting -- a huge number of the open source tools on this list, particularly the business applications, are now available on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis. For businesses, this model seems to make sense, as it gives them access to support and reduces the need for in-house staff to deploy and monitor applications. It also enables a more mobile workforce and keeps costs low. And of course, this model is also great for open source vendors as it gives them another way to monetize their open source projects.
Without further ado, here are fifty open source applications that might be able to replace the financial software you currently use for your home or business.
If you haven’t run into a situation where you need to rename multiple files in one go, you haven’t been using a computer for long. When the next time comes, turn to KRename. Its simple graphical interface makes renaming files easy for average users, and it offers a powerful template language for advanced users with more complex renaming tasks. Although it was written for the KDE desktop, KRename works under other Linux platforms and even on Windows.
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Web Browsers
Last week we showed Opera 10.60 to be the world's fastest Web browser. That was in the Windows world. But where do Chrome, Firefox, and Opera stand in Linux? Today we find out. Adding the Win 7 results, we'll also learn which OS has the speediest browser.
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Mozilla
Firefox 3.6.7 and Firefox 3.5.11 are now available as free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://firefox.com. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Firefox 3.6.7.
The latest Firefox 4.0 nightly build adds a new download ("Save link as") / upload dialog - in Linux that is, as I didn't try Firefox 4.0 Windows or Mac builds. This may have been added earlier but only now I've noticed it.
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SaaS
There’s a real explosion of cloud platforms and management tools, it seems you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one these days. In the commercial proprietary solutions space you have – CA’s 3Terra AppLogic, Enomaly, Nimbula, RightScale. In open source there are Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, Open Nebula and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. There are a bunch more that I failed to mention. It makes you wonder do we really need another one? How much different can they be?Rackspace Champion's Open Source Cloud I am not sure but the newest one appears to be rather significant.
NASA is dropping Eucalyptus from its Nebula infrastructure cloud not only because its engineers believe the open source platform can't achieve the sort of scale they require, but also because it isn't entirely open source.
NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp tells The Reg that as his engineers attempted to contribute additional Eucalyptus code to improve its ability to scale, they were unable to do so because some of the platform's code is open and some isn't. Their attempted contributions conflicted with code that was only available in a partially closed version of platform maintained by Eucalyptus Systems Inc., the commercial outfit run by the project's founders.
In some ways Facebook is still a LAMP site (kind of), but it has had to change and extend its operation to incorporate a lot of other elements and services, and modify the approach to existing ones.
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BSD
The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.1 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, and KDE 4.4.5
One of the features that sets FreeBSD apart from other open source opeating systems, is its governance structure. FreeBSD is not owned by a company, though many companies use it and contribute code back, but yet is run as if it were a company, with the Core Team taking decisions and steering the Project.
The FreeBSD Foundation funds various projects each year and there are several interesting projects in progress:
* DAHDI (formerly known as Zaptel) FreeBSD driver port--this project will make it possible to use FreeBSD as a base system for software PBX solutions
* resource containers and a simple per-jail resource limits mechanism
* userland dtrace
* BSNMP improvements
* jail-based virtualization
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Project Releases
The Lightspark project has released version 0.4.2 of its free, open source Flash player. According to Lightspark develoepr Alessandro Pignotti, the alternative Flash Player implementation is "designed from the ground up to be efficient on current and (hope fully) future hardware".
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Government
Operating as the Open Information Security Foundation, and working with a number of government-related private companies, a team headed by Mark Jonkman of Emerging Threats and Victor Julien of the Vuurmuur firewall project are offering an intrusion detection and prevention engine with multi-threading automatic protocol detection for a wide variety of protocols.
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Openness/Sharing
It's an ambitious effort to preserve, restore and promote the re-use of traditional skills and inventions from all over the world.
We risk stifling the development of new tools, both commercial and academic, and new knowledge under the weight of a legal regime that was designed to cope with the printing press. At the same time a simple statement that this kind of analysis is fair dealing will provide certainty without damaging the interests of copyright holders or complicating copyright law. These new uses will ultimately bring more traffic, and perhaps more customers, to the primary documents. By taking the simple and easy step of making automated analysis an allowable fair dealing exception everyone wins.
After the election and looking to the post-Becta future, Open Source Schools has been making new plans to ensure that the community is able to respond to the changing educational landscape where the benefits offered by open source are becoming ever more important.
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Open Data
Opening up food and agricultural data requires an information architecture and infrastructure that does not currently exist. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization is a leader in providing easily accessible, highly usable, and surprisingly current data, but right now it is far ahead of the pack in terms of transparency in reporting.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Twitter as X-Rated Hatred: Criticising Microsoft is Not OK, Calling for Beheadings (With Bounties on People's Heads) is OK
- Twitter automation missed 'hit job' advertising
- Balancing Activism Against (or With) Basic Necessities and Daniel Cantarín on Our Collective Battle for Software Freedom Around the World
- "I'm VERY angry about lots of stuff happening here in Argentina, all of it shielded behind the word "freedom"."
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- Links 16/08/2024: YouTube Bans and Surveillance Expanded
- Links for the day
- We Were Right All Along and the Collaborators of Microsoft Helped Competition Crimes of Microsoft
- Once again vindicated regarding UEFI "secure boot"
- [Meme] The New Windows Slogan
- stat me up
- Addendum: Associate's Notes on Free Software as a Labour Issue and the Connectivity Swindles
- these are related issues/causes
- Microsofters Infiltrating Roles of Authority and Government Positions to Protect Microsoft and to FUD Microsoft's Competition
- friends of Microsofters who bully me and my wife
- Links 16/08/2024: UK Skills Deficit and Kim Dotcom to be Extradited to the US (for Doing the Same Stuff GAFAM Does)
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 16/08/2024: Overgeneralisation and Games
- Links for the day
- Russia's Yandex 5 Times Bigger Than Microsoft... in Ukraine
- They'd rather rely on the Kremlin than on Microsoft
- [Meme] Gemini is Different, So What?
- different, not worse
- Now It's "Official": Over 4,000 Known Gemini Capsules in Lupa
- For the first time ever
- Clown Computing
- Reprinted with permission from Dr. Andy Farnell
- [Meme] What Freedom Means to IBM
- Free labou
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, August 15, 2024
- IRC logs for Thursday, August 15, 2024
- From 99% in 2012 to 27% in 2024: How Microsoft Lost Georgia
- What we're seeing is a migration from Windows to other platforms, notably GNU/Linux
- To Understand Cisco's Mass Layoffs Look at the Company's Soaring Debt (Same at Microsoft)
- Look what's happening to Intel - down almost 60% since the start of the year, 57% to be precise
- Windows Flying Low at 25%
- It's another all-time low
- [Meme] Long Texts You Never Bother Reading (Because Life is Too Short, Unlike Those Texts)
- The devil is in the terms of service
- Links 15/08/2024: Monkeypox Hysteria and Modern Homesteaders Living Off the Grid
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 15/08/2024: Confession of a Convention Game Master and Some Release nostalgia
- Links for the day
- Congratulations to Romania, Where Windows is Now "Minority Market Share" Platform
- Time will tell if GNU/Linux can pass 5% on the desktop/laptop "form factor" there
- Why It Matters That 4,000 Gemini Capsules Are Known to Lupa and Why Gemini Protocol Matters to Us
- I have no doubt Gemini Protocol will continue to expand because it solves a real problem
- Links 15/08/2024: Avast Surveillance Scandal Unsolved and Facebook Still Censors Terror Sympathisers
- Links for the day
- Daniel Cantarín's Response to Alexandre Oliva's Talk on Achieving Software Freedom in the Age of Platform Decay
- Soylent News caught up with the series
- 4,000 Gemini Capsules
- it's basically one capsule short of 4,000
- "Microsoft is a Sponsor of The New Stack."
- Many articles turn out to be just ads
- New Highs for Android in Russia, But It's Reportedly Working on Its Own Linux-Based Operating Systems (GAFAM-Free)
- statCounter isn't equipped to properly parse user agents or to keep up
- Upcoming Series: Terms of Service (TOS) Under the Microscope, FSF Party, GitHub Scandals, Clowns, and More
- Right now we have way more material than we have time to cover. But that's a good thing.
- Gemini Links 15/08/2024: Lies of Therapy and Web Applications
- Links for the day
- Software Freedom in Perspective - Part 5 - When Richard Stallman Came to Argentina
- It might seem a bit harsh, but a discussion at the end of this series will tie things together and explain why those things were said
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, August 14, 2024
- IRC logs for Wednesday, August 14, 2024
- Russia develops an alternative to Android and iOS | News.az
- Russia already has several of its own operating systems
- Links 14/08/2024: Ecology and War Inside Russia
- Links for the day
- Daniel Pocock - Use of Technology in European Parliament Election Campaign (Public Talk)
- It starts in 4 hours
- Android About to Fly Past Windows in Portugal
- Perhaps by month's end or next month Portugal will be orange (Android majority)
- How OpenAI Will Decrease the Losses
- You have no losses when you have no users left
- Giving Control to Microsoft is Always a Dire, Huge Mistake
- Microsoft is known for buying things and sabotaging things, not for creating things
- Founders That Sell Their Company to Microsoft Speak Out
- "Microsoft's closure of Arkane Austin in May was one of the more shocking events of the past couple of years"
- In Chile, Microsoft's Web Browser (a Chrome Copycat) Fell to 3.6%, About the Same as Firefox and Opera and Less Than Safari, Yandex Browser, Google Chrome
- It does not look like Chileans fancy Microsoft's browser. They go out of their way to use something else, even on Windows.
- Software Freedom in Perspective - Part 4 - Daniel on Linux-based Mobile Platforms in LATAM (Latin America)
- GNU, Linux, and mobile
- Almost Nothing of Invidious Left Online (YouTube is Attacking Gateways)
- what it looks like at this very moment
- Gemini Links 14/08/2024: Funeral for an E-reader and a Mother Wants a Laptop
- Links for the day
- Links 14/08/2024: 8 Years of GDPR and Ridicule of "Hey Hi" (AI) Hype
- Links for the day
- This is How You Give Microsoft More Control Over LibreOffice Both as Software and as a Project
- Didn't the Document Foundation learn from prior Microsoft Store scandals connected to LibreOffice?
- "Heroes of Fedora" Are Just Salaried Employees of IBM (But "Community" is Just Sounding a Lot Nicer)
- A real community would not allow IBM a majority
- YouTube Has Thrown Free Software Users Into a Crisis
- For many Free software users, who rely on Invidious, YouTube is nearly dead already
- [Meme] "New Chapter in the FSF."
- We expect to have some coverage from this week's event
- There is No I in "GAFAM" and Soon There Won't be I At All (Like Novell Vanished, Not Overnight, as It Took Over a Decade)
- Intel is going through the biggest crisis in its entire history
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, August 13, 2024
- IRC logs for Tuesday, August 13, 2024
- It's a "sm0l" World and It Won't Outsource to the Pentagon Anymore
- As many people aren't interested in a new PC - or simply cannot afford one - we can expect leaner operating systems to gain further
- Software Freedom in Perspective - Part 3 - GNU/Linux in Argentinian Desktops/Laptops
- Daniel explains why many years ago many PCs shipped with GNU/Linux and that there was an economic reason for it. At least in Argentina.
- Tivoisation and Decommodification in Clown Computing
- Some firms or organisations lost sight of what "servers" or "hosting" even mean
- The News Vacuum
- The problem is worse than just an absence of reporting
- x86 Lowered the Standards of Hardware Products
- A lot of it is just hacks and cheats that help fake performance